Residency Program Social Media Accounts and Recruitment - A Qualitative Quality Improvement Project

Social media use by United States medical residency programs has been gaining traction in medical education over the last few years. However, the degree of inﬂuence of residency program social media presence on a U.S. residency applicant's decision to apply to or rank a residency program through the National Resident Matching Program is unknown. Here we present our 2019 post-match quality improvement survey data from newly matched residents to Internal Medicine and Transitional Year residency programs at one community-based hospital. Our ﬁndings demonstrate that modern applicants value program social media proﬁles as additional information when determining whether to apply to or rank a residency program. As more U.S. graduate medical education programs move towards a virtual interview format, social media may play an increasingly important role in resident recruitment.


Background and Methods
Our community-based midwestern Internal Medicine Residency social media presence began in August 2016 as a component of our diverse wellbeing program designed to improve connectedness within and between residents and faculty in our Internal Medicine, Preliminary Medicine, and Transitional Year residencies. Program-specific accounts were developed within the Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook platforms, and content was curated by a selected team of faculty and residents. Over time we noticed an increasing number of "followers" from medical students, many of whom later applied to or even matched at our programs. In March 2019 a post-match survey (Supplementary File 1) was distributed electronically to matched incoming residents into Internal Medicine, Preliminary Medicine, and Transitional Year residencies at our institution. This quality improvement work was Fick L, Palmisano K, Solik M MedEdPublish https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000203.1 Page | 2 designed to understand the role that program media presence plays in the decision to apply to or rank our residency programs to further optimize our reach to potential applicants.

Results
Thirty-six of the 38 (94.7%) incoming residents completed the anonymous and voluntary survey via email link. Almost 42% (41.6%) of applicants stated that a program's social media presence influenced their decision to apply to a particular program (Figure 1). Over half (52.8%) of respondents stated that a program's social media presence had at least 'a little' impact or greater on their decision to rank a program at which they interviewed ( Figure 2). For those who were impacted by our residency program-specific social media accounts, the impacts had a positive effect on their decision to rank our program -with Instagram having a more positive impact than Twitter or Facebook ( Figure 3). "More than anything, it confirmed that it was the right fit for me."

"The social media presence reinforced the programs personality that I was shown during interviews and auditions but i wouldn't say it made a large impact in my decision making."
"I agree it has the potential to positively impact applicants decisions and create more transparency during the application trail." "Not a factor for me in choosing a program, but seems like something I may enjoy following as a resident." "Social media made St. Vincent more approachable, & more relatable. It made me excited to be colleagues with the personalities I was seeing." "It's always great to see that residents and staff in the program truly are like a family. Everyone on interview day claims they get along well and hang out outside of work but to be able to see and confirm that online is helpful. It isn't the biggest deciding factor but certainly helps."

Discussion
While this single institution, 2-program experience may not be generalizable to all programs, our data suggests that social media presence may be an important factor for some applicants in determining to which programs to apply and rank in the match. The authors suspect social media presence will serve an even larger role in decisions to apply to or rank prospective residency programs in the virtual interview era. Our experience suggests that Instagram may be residency-seekers' preferred social media format. More information is needed to understand the relationship between program social media profiles and applicants across specialties and program size.

Take Home Messages
US residency program applicants may be influences by programs' social media presence Residency recruitment committees should curate program social media profiles to aid recruitment